[X] My Assistant

[jsheff]

Have you seen these stunning descent images from Huygens?

Huygens views

[Matt]

How long before there is a similar print on Titan?

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA08115

Oh, it's covered with them -- Huygens just didn't land near one.

J, although you don't actually know it, there is a deckchair and a rolled up newspaper just out of shot in the huygens surface image....

[Bob Shaw]

J, although you don't actually know it, there is a deckchair and a rolled up newspaper just out of shot in the huygens surface image....

And the surface below Huygens is actually a towel, kindly left there by a German tourist. I still say it's always best if you know just where your towel is!

Bob Shaw

[ugordan]

Looking at another thread showing the surface of Venus as it would appear under Earth-like illumination conditions, I was wondering if the same could be done to the Huygens surface image? Obviously, it would still be a uniformly hued image, but would the surface actually look any different if the atmosphere weren't filtering specific wavelengths out? Is the scenery orange due to the atmosphere or accumulated organics (tholins, ...) or both?

[The Messenger]

Is the scenery orange due to the atmosphere or accumulated organics (tholins, ...) or both?

Iron-rich sand is my guess - very Mars-like. We should have a better handle, constraints upon composition from the polarized bistatic radar after T-14 this week.

[ngunn]

While we're still free to guess here's mine. Iron-rich sand seems rather too dense a material (if you mean silicate sand, that is) to be blowing around on the surface of an ice-world. I'd go with some kind of fluffed-up organic material - sort of sooty micro-snow with a nanostructure that does funny things to the reflection spectrum. The colour question is fascinating too. I go for most of the orange/brown colouration being due to the ambient lighting, which would make it very hard to distinguish between hues of grey and brown in the surface material itself.